Vivien Goldman at her Ladbroke Grove, London home 1987
The title of a brilliant new reissue collecting Vivien Goldman’s small contribution to recorded music says it all: not revolutionary, but Resolutionary. Over her five-decade career, the 61-year-old has been Bob Marley’s first UK publicist, an esteemed music journalist, French pirate radio DJ, reggae backing singer alongside Neneh Cherry and the Slits’ Ari Up, NYU’s visiting “punk professor,” Kid Creole’s biographer, and now the writer of a musical about his life, to name just the marquee gigs. For London-born Goldman, the enterprises are all intrinsically linked, her work rooted in making connections rather than drawing boundaries. “I don’t know whether it’s because I come from a very war-torn background, but that is really what drives me in all my endeavors,” she says, calling from an NYC tea shop for an appropriately freewheeling conversation. “I was a child of refugees.”
